VICTOR ALFRED PAUL VIGNON, (1947-1909)

Cour de ferme

Cour de ferme
signed 'V.Vignon.' (lower left)
oil on canvas
46.6 x 55.3cm (18 3/8 x 21 3/4in).

The authenticity of this work has kindly been confirmed by Monsieur Stéphane Kempa. This work will be included in the forthcoming Victor Vignon catalogue raisonné, currently being prepared.

Provenance
Bernheim-Jeune & Cie., Paris.
H. Hessel Collection.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, London, 21 October 1998, lot 347.
Prof. Ronald Pickvance Collection, UK.

Despite the exhaustive research on Impressionism, little is known about the life and work of Victor Vignon, an artist who exhibited at the last four of the eight 'Impressionist' exhibitions. A member of the école de Pontoise, this pupil of Corot and Adolphe-Félix Cals, came into contact with Camille Pissarro, Armand Guillaumin and Paul Cézanne at Auvers-sur-Oise around 1878, and shared the patronage of Dr. Paul Gachet. He appears to have moved permanently to the area a couple of years later, living in a succession of rented farmhouses in hamlets a few miles apart. This remained his coin de terre for the rest of his life and one of these venerable stone and thatch structures is the subject of the present canvas. Throughout the 1880s the pattern of development in Vignon's work mirrors that of other members of the école. Like Pissarro, his style broadened and he began to embrace the richer palette, broken brushwork and surface texture later associated with néo-Impressionisme. The present canvas, which must date from the mid-late 1880s, shows evidence of this in the treatment of foreground banks of grass, and in the thatch and gable wall of the house.

Were it not for the writer and school friend of Paul Cézanne, Paul Alexis, little would be known about Vignon in these years. The painter and his wife had been living in just such a rented farmhouse when, in the summer of 1887, Alexis visited him in connection with a series of articles he was producing for the paper, Le Cri du Peuple. In one such article devoted to Vignon, Alexis describes his arrival in the hamlet of Butry, five miles from Auvers, finding the modest farm on a hillside and being greeted by the fermière, who immediately went to fetch her husband. (Paul Alexis, writing under the pseudonym 'Trublot', 'Trubl' au vert – Victor Vignon', Le Cri du Peuple, 2 September 1887, p. 3). There followed 'une après-midi charmante avec Vignon', surveying landscapes of the Oise valley - paintings of the type that had been shown at the last two Impressionist exhibitions in 1882 and 1886. Even though on the death of his father in 1867, Vignon was not left penniless, the story he recounts to the writer is a romantic one of struggle in the difficult years following the Franco-Prussian War. Eventually, like Millet and Corot, shod in sabots and living 'amongst rabbits and chickens' in the depths of the country, he found happiness. It is possible that the present canvas represents the very house which furnished the Vignon ménage at the time.

Alexis's article was to be followed by one on Camille Pissarro which, according to the painter, lacked a 'positive tone' possibly misrepresenting his current adoption of néo-Impressionisme, an issue that was less significant in the complimentary survey of Vignon's work. If Alexis is to be believed, Vignon's farm-refuge came at the end of his peregrinations around Auvers and Jouy. In previous years these had made the artist difficult to find - such that he missed an important visit in 1884 from Theo van Gogh who had gone specifically in search of him. In the previous year, Theo, whose interests in Impressionism were germinating, had purchased works by the artist, two of which hung in the dining room of his apartment and would have been seen by his brother, Vincent van Gogh, during his years in Paris between March 1886 and February 1888. (C. Stolwijk & R. Thomson, Theo van Gogh, 1857-1891, Art dealer, collector and brother of Vincent, exh. cat., Amsterdam, 1999, p. 81). Although a meeting between the two artists at this time remains uncertain, it is clear that when he was established in Arles in the summer of 1888, Vincent hoped that Vignon might join him in the south. 'You do know', he wrote to his brother in mid-June'...that I still think that someone else might profit from the money that I spend alone. Either Vignon, or Gauguin, or Bernard.' (Vincent Van Gogh, 16 June 1888, quoted in The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Vol II, 1958, London, 2000, p. 599).

While Gauguin eventually took up the offer, later references indicate that so long as he remained in Arles and Saint-Rémy, Vincent sought news of Vignon from his brother, and it is significant that returning north, he found himself painting the very farmhouses which were Vignon's subject matter. The Auvers countryside, he declared in a further letter, 'is very beautiful', and contains 'among other things a lot of thatched roofs, which are getting rare ... it is real country, characteristic and picturesque' (Vincent Van Gogh, 21 May 1890, quoted in ibid., p. 273). The iconic status of the simple stone structures that punctuate the region might not have revealed itself so emphatically, had Vignon not drawn them into the centre of the Impressionist debate.

Clearly Vignon's work was, and would remain, more conservative than that of his Dutch contemporary. Comparable to that of Pissarro, we can assume that a picture like Cour de Ferme, if not the same, is broadly similar to the one shown in the final Impressionist exhibition titled Une ferme, vue de Codru, à Jouy. The likelihood is that such a thought encouraged its previous owner, the distinguished Impressionist scholar, Ronald Pickvance, to acquire it.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for this catalogue note.